MP Update: Exchange 2007 Native MP for OpsMgr R2

Its been a long time coming.. but its finally here. Straight out of the oven.. the smoking hot Exchange 2007 native MP!! This MP has has gone through a great development process because it wasn't just the Product team that was doing the work and making decisions... but they got the OpsMgr MVPs, CSS experts like Kevin Holman and Adrian Doyle, the Exchange Center of Excellence, MCS Operations IT team and 512 Beta customers all involved!!

I for one was truly honored to be able to be part of the development of this MP, that even when down to scrutinizing areas like Wizard flows.

So here are some of the highlights of this MP:

• Discovery is turned off by default so that users can control the deployment of the MP
• Very extensive 95 page MP Guide
• Rollups reflect state of synthetic transactions. This means that the Availability metrics will reflect on user experience rather than server state
• The Availability metrics described above can be published to the OpsMgr R2 SLA Dashboard
• New Mailflow and Client Access Server synthetic transaction template and interactive wizards
• Support for monitoring multiple Exchange organizations from a single Management Group
• Cross-forest mail flow transaction great for monitoring an Exchange migration scenario which also works with the Cross Platform monitor for SMTP gateways
• Operators can see the links between Exchange Servers with visualized synthetic transactions using perspectives
• 15 Capacity planning reports like database size and message volumes, 30+ reports in total
• Matching 15 Service Level Objectives to view the state of Mail Operations such as whether mails are delivered based on the agreed SLA
• A nicely tuned set of Rules and Monitors making it a less noisy MP
• Threshold monitors go through consecutive samples to reduce noise
• Synthetic transactions are aware of maintenance mode
• Event log collection turned off by default
• Heavy workflows like report data collection scripts and synthetic transactions are spread out using Sync Time to reduce load on the agent
• The Exchange Best Practice Analyzer is run by the MP checking over 800 configuration aspects of an Exchange server compared to best practices.
• Clustering and log shipping scenarios are fully supported

A big shout out to my man Ake Pettersson and his team for this MP.

BIG NOTE: This MP only works for Ops Mgr R2. Also a watch out mentioned by Ake that if you are importing this MP through the new R2 console, the unsealed SLM reporting MP will not be downloaded. So go to the catalog for this.

Download it from the catalog here